More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Author:Satoshi Yagisawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

9

The following week, the cold air retreated and the warm days returned for a time. At midday, it felt hot wearing a jacket.

I tried to find the book that Tomo wanted, The Golden Dream, just as I had promised Takano.

I asked my uncle about it first, since that seemed the surest way to find any book.

But my uncle said he’d never seen or even heard of the book. I’d taken it for granted that he, of all people, would know it if it was an old Japanese book, but my assumption was totally wrong. And to make things worse, he barely showed any interest, which was so unlike him. Normally, my uncle would’ve gotten all worked up, searched until he found it. Lately, my uncle had seemed odd (he was odd before, of course, but not in this way). It was like he was profoundly tired. When I got worried and asked him if he was all right, he turned it around and asked me what I was talking about, so I figured there wasn’t much to worry about.

With no other options, I made the rounds of the secondhand bookshops on the way home from work, keeping up my search for the book. Takano had assumed it was some kind of novel, but if my uncle didn’t know it there was a decent chance that was wrong too, so I even popped into some shops that specialized in illustrated books.

In a mountain of thousands of old books, I was searching for a single volume, with only the slightest clue to go on. I found it surprisingly fun—like a treasure hunt. I wanted to find it for Takano, but I had also become deeply curious about the book itself. What kind of a book would Tomo want so badly? Was it funny? Maybe it was the kind of book that could change your whole perspective on life? I’d been feeling uneasy about things with Wada since last week, which only made me want a book like that even more. But the search proved to be more arduous than expected. As I made the rounds, not only could I not find the book, I couldn’t even find a person who knew of its existence. And when I asked, Wada said he didn’t know it either. It seemed the book that Tomo wanted to find was only for the true diehards.

But the harder it was to find the book, the more my interest in it grew.

My next step was to ask my uncle to get me into the auction being held at the Rare Book Hall in Jimbocho.

When you run a secondhand bookshop, the auction is your best opportunity to acquire books in large quantities. You could even say that it’s nearly impossible to keep a bookshop going if you don’t attend the auctions regularly. So, of course, all the bookshop owners of Jimbocho would be at the auction in the Rare Book Hall. It was easy to gather information there, and you could find a rare book without having to walk to all the shops.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.